dLux MediaArts sponsored an event with for the August 3rd Art After Dark night of the 2012 Sydney Biennial with Warren Armstrong, Andrew Burrell and Virta-Flaneurazine. On Pier 2/3, the Sydney electronic collective, Filthy Children, played as free prescriptions of the mobile version of VF were handed out to willing participants. Apparently hundreds have taken the experimental medicine and benefited from its results. If you are there, the secret is you can get a drug dose simply by downloading the Layar Augmented Reality application and searching for the layer, “Dose”. In fact the best way to take the drug is to access the layer “Bufo Colonies” which will reveal a small outgrowth of the Stedelijk Museum colony Bufo toads which can be licked on your phone screen or iPad.
Remember also, that although the experience has pleasurable side effects, the medication is primarily developed to help with problems of Wanderlust Deficit Disorder (WAD), a form of Internet addiction. This is an unapproved virtual medication and at this point Virta-Flaneurazine cannot take responsibility for its use or affects.
The Stedelijk Museum has been in renovations for 8 years now. This has apparently lead to conditions ideal for the spreading of invasive animal species that thrive on art. The Stedelijk Museum colony has recently been discovered, around and inside the main museum under construction and renovation, but also at its temporary events and exhibitions site at the Trouw Amsterdam. Specifically, this colony seems to have taken on items related to the first upcoming fall exhibition there of Mike Kelley’s work, displaying skin coloring from afgans to “Sex to Sexty” magazine to abstraction. At the event at the Trouw Amsterdam entitled “Augment IT” the colony was clearly sighted. Apparently the visionary effects of touching or licking good toads are some of the most powerful experiences yet.
Stedelijk Museum Colony growth with workmen
Stedelijk Museum Colony inside the empty museum in front of the Karel Appel wall
Trouw hallucination experience after contact with toad’s skin toxin- near a total black out…
“I shall please,” the translation of the Latin word “placebo”, suggests the willing complicity of a patient to imagine a cure. This empty control procedure might also be applied to various belief systems necessary for us to create what we understand as reality. Increasingly our intermediary existence between physical and virtual lives raises these questions about that which we have previously dismissed as purely ephemeral.
We finally got a chance to fully test augmented reality prescriptions for patients with smartphone addictions. We were given the opportunity to open a small clinic at the “Off Label Festival” at Open Space Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia. The effect seemed to work well with volunteers wandering throughout the gallery during the opening, October 27. Many of our subjects still want to spend a good deal of time talking about the nature of virtual drugs and their involvement with smartphones. At one point it was noted by a patient that I was continually holding my iPhone. I proceeded to place it on the table and fully admit my own over identification with this object. A full portfolio of some of the visions can be viewed here. We don’t really use placebos in our studies but we thought we’d give a nod to the title of our portion of the event by translating “Art of the Placebo” to its derivation “I Shall Please“.
October 9: Video documentation of Occupy Wall Street colony breaching the barriers set up at the NYSE with mounted police. Later strange clump-like behavior above the drum circle at Zuccotti Park, with a very large rising uber OWS toad.
As of today, October 5, the outbreak of a new bufo colony was documented in augmented reality in a barricaded area in front of the New York Stock Exchange. We will simply call it the Occupy Wall Street Colony, or the OWS Colony for short. This particular species seems to have markings on its skin in the form of a swirling NYSE façade and generate above, a hovering pie chart of the US skewed distribution of wealth.
Bufo toad of the Occupy Wall Street Colony at an organizational meeting of Occupy Wall Street leaders at Liberty Park, including Michael Moore in the orange hat. Police presence severely hampering cell phone reception, causing toad to adopt a highly decreased size. VIDEO
Researchers at Virta-Flaneurazine Laboratories report that, in an effort to identify the exact time and place that the fabled leap from online virtual worlds to augmented reality accrued, they have uncovered evidence that this phenomenon was associated with early VF clinical trials in Los Angeles, Belfast and Xi’an from 2008 to 2010. One of the first documented breaches was the emergence of a giant Bufo Virtanus AR Toad in MOMA, October 9, 2010 and the subsequent spread of colonies to Chelsea, NY, Boston, Australia, Venice, Italy and other worldwide locations. Artifacts can now be detected at these locations using AR detection software on consumer quality handheld mobile data collection instruments.
Test subject Virta-Rat spotted outside the former Fringe Exhibition space in Chinatown, Los Angeles, July 16, 2011.
A evening moment with the 33 1/2 RPM Sunset Bufo Toads in the process of colonizing the ICA Boston. apparently they have adopted a record skip associated with the “Record” show there.
It seems that the Sex and Death Colony hatched quietly in the Sydney Botanical Gardens has gotten out of control and is spreading to a series of smaller Australian towns (d/lux MEDIA ARTS). Colonies seem to be appearing westward and southward with no apparent rhyme or reason. My colleague there, Warren Armstrong, (the organizer of (Un)seen Sculptures), is vigorously monitoring the situation and calls weekly on Saturday nights to let me know the conditions. It’s uncanny that this subspecies should spread in a country that has been plagued by its ancestor. This is I suppose, a similar sort of infestation, with all good intentions of those of us at VF, looking for a means to free internet living. Warren has ambitiously set up a site to track what he calls “Bufo’s Progress“.
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John Craig Freeman
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Virta-Flaneurazine 